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As someone who is roughly in the same age group as the author and who was running a BBS, has witnessed the rise of IP4 networks, HTTP, Mosaic etc. let me provide a counter-point.
The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP. (Radio on free frequencies is possible and there are valiant attempts, they will ultimately remain niche and have severe bandwidth limitations)
For decades ISP have throttled upload speeds: they don't want you to run services over their lines. When DSL was around (I guess it still is) in Germany, there was a mandatory 24h disconnect. ISP control what you can see and how fast you can see it. They should be subject to heavy regulation to ensure a free internet.
The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it.
So what you can own is your local network. Using hardware that is free of back-doors and remote control. There's no guarantee for that. If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just ordered might be compromised. We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors.
As to content creation: There are so so many tools available that allow non-technical users to write and publish. There's no crisis here other than picking the best tool for the job.
In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.
By shevy-java 2026-02-2319:5710 reply > In short: there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.
We can build such a society. I am not sure why you think this is never possible.
People can work for a better world. That sometimes works, too.
There is hope. It's not only possible, but it is likely and is already underway. DNS can be replaced. IPv4/v6 can be replaced. We just need to build a layer on top that ignores the access controls of the underlying layer (the Internet), then replace the underlying layer altogether with new infrastructure.
There will be more efforts like this: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io
Those who want control over other people's mouths and eyes and ears, and rely on it to maintain their undeserved authority and prosperity are going to have a bad time.
By DrScientist 2026-02-2410:372 reply I think some of those barriers are going away ( in the UK it's now possible to get symmetric full fibre at a reasonable price ), static IPs, ISP's without filtering etc.
I think the main barrier is still the complexity of running your own service - it's a full time job to keep on top of the bad actors.
For example, if you have your own domain it's perfectly possible to run your own email server - however it's quite a lot of ongoing effort - it's not just set up and forget.
By dollylambda 2026-02-2320:061 reply > We should demand from our legislators that hardware like this is free of back-doors
In some countries that may be possible (if only for now). Where chips are produced makes that an impossibility for most. That is, you can have certain guarantees if you run the chip fab, although if you are downstream of that, it can be a tall order to guarantee your chips are sovereign. So, while I like the sentiment that you have some sort of control behind your router, I'm really unsure how true that is given the complexity of producing modern day chips. Disclaimer, not an expert, just an opinion.
By phendrenad2 2026-02-2323:24 This is just the "No True Scotsman" fallacy (with a dash of "appeal to tradition" fallacy). Yes, the internet has never been perfect, but it was really good for most users a long time and has only lost freedom for the majority of users recently with the rise of coordinated multi-state online censorship. Yes, there have been problems in the past, but if you can't compare now to then and see that things have radically shifted, I don't know what else to say to convince you.
By fuzzfactor 2026-02-249:08 >there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back. We never had it in the first place.
I'd settle for a maximally private totally uncensored IPV4 like there used to be. Broadband turned out to be over-rated in some ways.
One of the good things about dial-up was the way it was built on a peer-to-peer network that "everybody" already had, their land-line telephone service.
Way before actual "networking", anybody with a modem could connect privately with anybody else who had one.
An ISP could be formed by taking incoming calls from all active digital users simultaneously, and that was where the networking was done, plus connection to other networks around the world.
You could still contact any one computer user privately if you wanted to, without going through an ISP, just like it was before the web.
Also connect one network with another distant one, such as one office building to another, without ISP.
If anybody wanted to form their own working ISP, they could do it privately anytime as an interested group and not even tell anybody about it if they didn't want to. It might not be a commercial ISP but there was no mainstream to begin with where it was assumed that an ISP must be commercial or make any money at all.
These connections were intended to be "totally" private by law, it was well-established that a court order was required to do a wiretap, and the penalty for violation was based on the concept that spying on Americans was one of the worst crimes, and needed to deter those who acted to compromise the privacy & freedom that America cherished so deeply. And preserve citizen rights the country was chartered to uphold, no differently than before the telephone was invented.
There's nothing like this any more, land-line copper is in miserable disuse so the only remaining wire if any is TV cable. But the only way to do peer-to-peer contact over cable is through an ISP, how private is that and why is there not a court order necessary before privacy can be compromised and very select Americans be subject to espionage?
Cell phones won't help you now, they can be tapped without wires.
The options are far fewer than the possibilities offered when dial-up first got popular.
By bsder 2026-02-240:13 > The democratization ends at your router.
Mostly because we have allowed the ISPs to collapse into monopolies.
People have forgotten that the US used to have competition in broadband back at the point where the Internet was rolling out to everybody.
> there's no hope of getting a world-wide, free, uncensored, unlimited IP4/6 network back.
What do you mean "back"? It was never free, as in zero-cost. It was also not very unlimited; I remember times when I had to pay not only for the modem time online, but also for the kilobytes transferred. Uncensored, yes, because basically nobody cared, and the number of users was relatively minuscule.
The utopia was never in the past, and it remains in the future. I still think that staying irrelevant for large crowds and big money is key.
> The large networks, trans-atlantic, trans-pacific cables, all that stuff is beyond the control of individuals and even countries. If they don't like your HTTP(S) traffic, the rest of the world won't see it.
Not really having a plan here, so if nothing else this is out of curiosity, but I'd like to know who is actually owning that stuff.
For something that seems so ubiquitous and familiar like the internet, it would probably be good to understand who owns most of its infrastructure.
By adrianwaj 2026-02-253:43 "If you are being targeted even the Rasperry Pi you just ordered might be compromised."
Is that like owning a car and having some third-party (who?) remotely cut the brake cable because the manufacturer fitted that "feature" in stealth? Or maybe they did something more benign (ie disable car speakers) just as a reminder as to "who is the boss?"
By DeathArrow 2026-02-2410:03 >The democratization ends at your router. Unless you are willing to lay down your own wires - which for legal reasons you most likely won't be able to do, we will hopelessly be dependent on the ISP.
We can have other protocols on top of TCP/IP and build a new Internet over the existing one, much like TOR/I2P/Hyphanet/Lokinet but without many of the disadvantages of those.
By EQmWgw87pw 2026-02-246:402 reply Instead of thinking about cables, have we considered the idea of satellites getting cheap enough to launch?
> I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access
A whole post about not needing big corporations to publish things online, and then they use Microsoft to publish this thing online...
By Findecanor 2026-02-2318:219 reply I remember a web when practically every ISP allowed you to have a "home page" hosted with them. Your home page was situated in the "public_html" directory of your home directory on their server — hence the name.
Then the URL was http://www.<hostname.domain>/~<username>
I haven't see an URL with a tilde ('~') in it in a long time.
Why did ISPs stop with this service? Was it to curb illegal file sharing?
